1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates, generally, to the display of data, and more particularly, to the graphical presentation and arrangement of data for visual presentation.
2. Description of the Related Art
Infographics (or data visualizations) are graphical representations of information, data, or knowledge, which representations include one or more text elements and/or graphic elements. The use of infographics has increased in recent decades in both consumer and corporate domains. However, most professionals (including, e.g., individuals, organizations, professional practitioners, service providers, and small-business owners) do not employ infographics to present their professional résumé or profile, nor to convey information about their accomplishments, skills, capabilities, services, or effectiveness, for various reasons.
At the most fundamental level, many professionals lack the ability to produce attractive graphics on their own, let alone infographics designed to effectively convey particular personalized professional or service information. Accordingly, specialists such as design professionals and computer/web developers are typically hired to produce such graphics. Once an infographic has been designed, several rounds of manual rework with the specialist might be involved, such as to significantly change its design (e.g., converting a horizontal plot to a vertical plot) or to update the style of the graphic or its elements (e.g., its fonts, or colors). Additionally, an infographic designed at a particular point in time might involve an additional round of manual rework with the specialist each time new information becomes available.
In addition, the typical professional does not have their personal or professional data organized in a coherent and usable format for the construction of an infographic via a purely algorithmic drawing technique. Often, such data is in lexical, unstructured form, such that generating an infographic would involve the costly and time-consuming process of gathering and transforming the data into a coherent and usable format. Moreover, the use of data in a given infographic often involves manually plotting the data prior to the construction of the infographic itself, often to explore manually the best way for presenting that set of data prior to finalizing the presentation, often even prior to being able to identify an appropriate type of infographic for displaying the data.
Other barriers to the creation of infographics exist even for specialists who routinely create such infographics. Conventionally, there has been no marketplace that connects those seeking to have personal/professional infographics created with the designers, creators, and editors of those infographics, nor a marketplace with infographics templates available for purchase. Nor are conventional methods known for tracking or quantifying a viewer's engagement with and/or attention to a given infographic, including the numbers of loads and/or views, and the numbers of clicks, views, time spent viewing, and/or events associated with the individual components of a given infographic. No conventional scheme is known for test-marketing (using, e.g., A/B or multivariate testing) a given infographic rendered in different views and formats in order to identify the most effective presentation of a given set of data. Nor do systems exist for varying the presentation of a particular infographic based on a owner-supplied list of rules, or other data gathered and/or generated by a potential infographic viewer, such as the specific URL or entry path a potential viewer takes to a given infographic, their clickstream behavior prior to seeing an infographic, or preferences they might provide prior to the viewing of an infographic. Further, no systems are known for readily extracting and showing benchmarks for comparable data that happens to be expressed across a collection of infographics, especially those with varying design formats. Additionally, there are typically no systems for packaging a collection of individual infographics into larger objects that can be treated as coherent documents, nor any methods for enabling the infographic to be dynamic and interactive, such as by showing a summary view of a set of data that can be further expanded through event-driven triggers, without having to specifically model those interactions on a one-off basis, in conjunction with a computer programmer.
Additional challenges exist because there are no known systematic, repeatable solutions for those seeking to work with collections of infographics that collectively represent more than one individual or subject area. More specifically, there is no known systematized method for assembling a “portfolio” of professionals, where the professionals are represented by individual instances of one or more particular infographics reflecting either the identity of those professionals or some aspect of their professional skills or services. Even if such a portfolio were assembled, there are currently no methods for normalizing the infographic presentations according to a design “override” established by a portfolio builder or viewer (including, e.g., selection of which data elements to include/exclude, and optionally remapping the presentation related to those elements). Nor are there known methods for transmitting the portfolio to a third party or website for viewing and interaction, or methods for allowing the viewer to further remap the presentation of those elements to their own specification.
Additionally, there are no known conventional methods for dynamically creating an “aggregate infographic” that collectively summarizes the equivalent infographics in the portfolio. For example, if there are a number of infographics representing an individual attorney's practice specialties, there is no known method for using an aggregate infographic to portray the skills of an entire group of lawyers, whether through layered overlays or through aggregated sums that could point to the individual data comprising those sums. Even if a portfolio as described above were assembled, there are also no known methods for measuring engagement with the portfolio as a whole, including numbers of views and identifying interaction/engagement with particular infographics within the portfolio. Finally, there are no known methods to take a collection of homologous infographics and automatically generate benchmarks, averages, and mean comparisons, particularly where the presentation of those infographics or the amount of data they contain varies.